Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/169

144 consciousness views the temporal order, — not ignoring one jot or tittle of its sharp distinctions of past or of future, of succession or of duration, — but still viewing the whole time-process as the expression of a single Internal Meaning. What we now call past and future are not merely the same for God; and, nevertheless, they are viewed at once, precisely as the beginning and the end of the rhythm are not the same for our experience, but are yet at once seen as belonging to one and the same whole succession.

Or again, an eternal knowledge is often supposed to be one that abstracts from time, or that takes no account of time; so that, for an eternal point of view it is as if time were not at all. But to say this is as if one were to speak of observing at once the meaning or character of the whole phrase or rhythm by simply failing to take any note at all of the succession as such. The meaning is the meaning of the succession; and is grasped only by observing this succession as something that involves former and latter elements, while these elements in time exclude one another, and therefore follow, each one after its predecessor has temporally ceased, and before its successor temporally appears. Just so, we assert that the eternal insight observes the whole of time, and all that happens therein, and is eternal only by virtue of the fact that it does know the whole of time.

Or again, some doctrines often speak of an eternal insight as something wholly and inexplicably different from any temporal type of consciousness, so that how God views His truth as eternal truth, no man can say. But our theory regards the essential relation of an eternal